In the first blog of this series, we explored the beginning stages of assessing how DevOps transforms organizations. Alongside strategic initiatives that impact technology, DevOps also changes how teams work together towards common goals, something we covered late last month in our in-depth culture analysis.
The cultural transformation in an organization isn’t the only impetus for change. As we’ll explore in this post and series, adopting DevOps is like a complete body workout – while you think you’re getting fitter, you’re also building muscles. In organizations, the DevOps experience makes you feel like you are innovating, but you’re also changing the way everything works together, which we’ll explore a little more in this blog.
Unifying the Business
In a traditional organizational structure, business units operate apart with liaisons serving as the communications point amongst everyone involved. Over time, organizations had adopted this because it was comfortable and served the strengths of each individual, and individuals didn’t have to swim in the jargon of other areas. Despite the comfort, however, it also created obvious and glaring inefficiencies which slowed down the ability to do business quickly and effectively.
DevOps is a transformational piece for organizations because it unifies the business like never before. By building off the philosophy of continuous innovation and collaboration, business units are instead forced to work together and get to know the different parts of business operations. For example, engineering and sales must now collaborate to make sure product updates and patches are communicated.
Collaborative Training and Auditing
As highlighted in our blog post last month, DevOps also transforms culture by evolving how technical employees work with each other. In his paper, research analyst John Rymer of Forrester explained that DevOps was changing how organizations leverage on-the-job training and attention towards reaching goals. Notably, these included:
- DevOps contributing to the development of Agile methodologies. As organizations hire certified project management professionals, they’ll also need to focus on adopting the right communication and collaboration best practices that push projects through to market faster than traditional methods.
- Checking in with employees to make sure they are kept abreast of organizational changes. Though DevOps is innovative for the organization, many employees may find the speed of work and collaboration to be disheartening. Leadership must keep an open-door policy to ensure that their DevOps strategy is always adapting to current interests.
- Developing the right communications channels that allow for further organizational changes. As strategies are eventually rekeyed, there will be the necessary internal workflows necessary that continue to enable DevOps.
It should be noted that during the communications and checking-in portion of the DevOps cultural development process that auditing should occur as well. Issues of relevance to leadership should include:
- Checking to make sure the right technologies are available to use or can be migrated to the cloud. A lack of the right tools can make all the difference for employees.
- Identify future deployments and migration. While some technologies may not necessarily be moved today, there will always be opportunity in the future as organizations free up new budget and look to upgrade their infrastructure.
Talk to Perficient
Are you looking to impact culture in your organization? Talk to our consultants by sending us an email at sales@perficient.com so we can assess your DevOps roadmap.
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